Ethernet switching in a nut shell

Hatebreed: Where have I been? Oh my God I've been up to my eyeballs in busy!!! The only reason I had the time to write this little tutorial is because I got up in the middle of the night to feed the baby and started hammering away before going back to bed. I'm going to try to do a little more in the next few days, and expand on some of the finer nuances of switching. We'll see though. I've been promising friends I'd get some pictures of the baby posted for almost three weeks and have I done it? Nope!

TK> are you in my masters class? We just covered that about 2 weeks ago :D It's an online school, so i guess its possible that you are in there also. If you are working at getting a masters through an online program that is.

Nope, not me. I guess I would need a bachelor's before I started working on my masters. :rolleyes: heh....

I'm just an infrastructure/WAN engineer for a medium sized enterprise. I've been working with switches since they cost ten grand for 8 ports of 10mb. There was a time when (except for the pain it was to install) I was sure that token ring would take over the world and ethernet was just a fad...... Shows how much I know. :D

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by dcongram
Important subset to the (great) info from thread_killer.

1. Switches are a treated as a single collision domain

Remember the old 3-4-5 rule ?

---

Detailing on TK's link on this, switches use store-and-forward tech, enabling simultanious access, thus propagation delay is less/not of a concern anymore...

Besides, building/having a large layer 2 only network is network managment suicide (single broadcast domain, segmentation...).

Edit: hum, re-reading myself, I'm not sure I make much sense.. oh well!

Ammo

TK> I just thought the timing was funny...

ammo> not all switches use store&foreward... some (most) use cut-through. Store & foreward is basically on high end enterprise switches. cut-through is on most of the switches that people buy for home use. Then there is a hybrid that is used in midrange switches.

Well, out of the 3 most popular "home switches" makers (linksys, d-link, netgear) I've checked-out, all 3 use store-and-forward even on their smallest models...

The low/midrange stackable managed d-link switches (des-3624) I use at work are also store-and-forward and so is my core switch, a cisco catalyst-3550...

Granted this is all relatively recent equipment (less than 3 years), but I wouldn't say most switches are still cut-through...

Ammo

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by thread_killer
If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to do more on layer 4-7 switching and/or spanning tree.

---

Yes Please!

Ok, I'll get to another tutorial. It won't be today though, *maybe* tomorrow if there aren't too many fires to put out.

tk

For a good tutorial, I am willing to wait ;) thank you for all your work tk.

Thanks for the effort thread_killer...looking forward to more tutorials from you in the future.